White and Other Tales of Ruin

He began to shake. The sky was dark, as though the episode had lasted for hours instead of minutes. His limbs jerked and his head began to pound the rock, his nerves pirouetting him into unconsciousness.

He was trying desperately to identify a constellation in the night sky. In some vague way he thought God may send him a sign of comfort, something familiar to hang onto. But as he frothed at the mouth and passed out, everything was alien. Even the stars showed no sign of friendship. They stared down as he battered himself to pieces on the island.

When he came to it was dark. The sun had truly set.

Moisture had settled on him, like tiny glimmering insects mistaking him for the ground. His limbs ached, his mouth was dry, tongue swollen. His neck felt ready to snap if he moved, but slowly he raised himself up onto one elbow. His back, cut and crispy with dried blood, ripped free of the spiky rocks beneath him. Hauling himself from a bed of knife blades would have felt much the same.

It was night-time, but he could still see, courtesy of a full yellow moon. It hung above the sea, its light shimmering from the surface of the water. Wisps of cloud passed across its face. Stars speckled the rest of the sky. Moonlight played around the edges of the pit, giving it the appearance of a pouting wound, pale and bloodless.

Roddy felt cold, but it was merely one more discomfort to add to the list. His bones ached, his arms were bruised and heavy, his legs sang with pins and needles. When he moved, everything hurt. Muscles cried out against the aggravation.

A moderate breeze was drifting across the island, carrying the tang of brine and seaweed, and other less readily identified smells. Decay, perhaps, death and putrescence. But subtle, like perfume for a murderer. The weather played games with his senses, while his own body sought to confuse him more. He was weak, so weak. His stomach rumbled angrily, calling for food. His gullet felt parched and rough, and the thought of water sent his throat into dry convulsions. Then he noticed that the dew decorating his body was thicker than water. He smeared his hand across his torn shirt and bare neck, and it came away sticky with blood. He must have been rolling around, striking himself on the ground, opening himself up so that his jaded blood seeped down between the rocks. Yet again, the island had drawn its fill.

Norris. His shout when he fell had been part scream, part laugh. Roddy had not even been conscious to bear witness the ceasing of the echoes. And Max had gone too, shouting incoherently, raging and raving into the night even before Norris had fallen. Had he seen the woman? Did the sight of her tortured body, floating in the darkness and gesticulating uselessly, finally drive him to distraction? He’d been shouting for God when he went, and Roddy was not sure whether he even believed in God. But faith was a fickle thing, and Roddy had often seen a sudden resurgence of belief when situations arose to encouraged it. Times when simple logic explained nothing.

He felt so weak. In the dark the ground beneath him was even stronger than before, full of power, vibrating with the life it seemed so hell bent on stealing. Perhaps it had begun sucking their energy from the moment they left the boat, finishing with some before others. Now, maybe Roddy was the only one left. Max had gone, and try as he might Roddy could not bring himself to believe in his survival. There were too many holes up here, too many sharp edges to fall victim to.

The sense of being unutterably alone — not just here, but in the whole world — fell upon him. He cried out with the hopelessness of it all, tried to picture people dying across the globe at that moment in the name of freedom and justice, but their plight did not touch him. Instead he mourned his own torpid, deserted soul, pleading for something to fill it, opening his heart up to enlightenment as he had inadvertently offered his flesh to the island. He waited for the light, yearned the warmth or whisper that would tell him God had found him. Had, in fact, never been away. He recalled his mother’s voice as she explained why he should say his prayers every night before bed. “God always knows you’re here, but it’s best to keep in touch, just in case,” she would say. As a lad, he had often wondered what the ‘just in case’ could entail. A slightly muddled God, perhaps, with a memory faded and fuddled with immense age? Now, he knew the case in ‘just in case’. He knew it, but however much he tried he just could not bring himself to believe that he had doomed himself simply by not believing. The God he was aware of from other people was not like that. He forgave, He loved everyone. He was everywhere, all the time, guiding fate. Steering torpedoes into engine rooms. Urging the cold glint of steel along wrist veins. Blowing sudden surges into streams, smashing heads open and laying pagan brains out to view.